Flight Time wrote:I think any line swivel is of little value anyway because they won't spin with any tension on the lines. The lines will twist before the swivel moves, no matter how nice the swivel. Better to have it on the loop so you can deal directly with the inevitable twists.

On my 3 kites, it takes two hands to turn the swivels. Sometimes they freeze tight.
I started rinsing off the salt and sand, but it was too late to save them.
Rust is dripping out from the China stainless.

Back in 2012, I contacted SS Customer Service.
They told me swivels cost $100,
but they would give me a "special deal" at their cost of $50.
No thanks, I think the truth is more like $14.

So here we have a major brand, who won't stand behind a defective part.
And I just lost a buyer for my used kite, because of it.

slingshot swivel.jpg

Same happened to mine. I tried rubbing a little oil on it to maybe reduce the rate of decay .... but I doubt it'll make any difference.

So here we have a major brand, who won't stand behind a defective part.
And I just lost a buyer for my used kite, because of it.
...

I had the slingshot spreader bar with releasable hook ; and Loved it
until
i lost my 15M Ozone sport into a lamp-post, because it Broke. YES, the
leash was attached to the part that broke off.

There was a rusty looking residue surrounding the cracked aria.

And there STILL putting out equipment, that's made with Cheap materials ? Glad i
stopped buying there stuff about 8 years ago !!! HOW do they Stay in business ??

321 kiteboarding, out of Cocoa Beach Florida, sponsored me with my Dynabar V-7
with sliding hook ; it appears to be made from some very High-quality materials.
Will i ever purchase another one , or recommend it to a friend (?)YES !!

Flight Time wrote:I think any line swivel is of little value anyway because they won't spin with any tension on the lines. The lines will twist before the swivel moves, no matter how nice the swivel. Better to have it on the loop so you can deal directly with the inevitable twists.

Actually on my bar (Switch), it just does not work when there is no tension on the lines.
But if you get tension on the lines again, the swivel will automatically spin to untangle one twist and sometimes with even twists.

But the switch bar has both, swivel on the frontlines and one at the loop to do it by hand.
So its a nice extra.

If you get one (or two) spin, it twists automatically, if you get more, you do some by hand.

I guess the average person has no idea how bad salt and sand are. You can rinse all you want but you will never get all the sand and salt out. Try WD40 to break it free. In an extreme case ( I don't recommend it because I don't know how they are made ) try boiling it in water. This might completely ruin the swivel though.

I work in a chemical plant and part of a lot of our byproducts are salts. They destroy our pumps and increase corrosion. We are not talking about cheap stainless either. It's all so about $5000 a pump seal every time one goes out and those are the cheap ones.

Flight Time wrote:I think any line swivel is of little value anyway because they won't spin with any tension on the lines. The lines will twist before the swivel moves, no matter how nice the swivel. Better to have it on the loop so you can deal directly with the inevitable twists.

Yep!!!

Nope!!! My reasoning is that I do a lot more on one side and not on the other.

Trust me the LF swivel does work and a prof is 3hrs today with 40km in total and enormous number of loops to the right side only. Yep, my stronger side and the shore position.
For sure, no tension no spin. It will untwist itself under tension. Try it...

A few weeks ago I helped a friend to replace his ceased Slingshot swivel (115$CAD+TX) with the Wainman's equivalent (40$CAD+TX) and it all went pretty smoothly, but being a curious bugger - I have decided to investigate the guts of the ceased one. All it took - was some poking around with a 1/2" drill bit, so here we go:

All in all there are about 10$ worth of parts by a really-really loooong - Chinese - stretch.

Absolute rubbish from any point of view.

You'd better maintain this sucker if you want it to last any reasonable amount of time.

The morals of Slinghsot charging 100$US for it - that I'm gladly leaving to others to discuss.

alexeyga wrote:Sorry for resurrecting an old topic guy - I just had to!

A few weeks ago I helped a friend to replace his ceased Slingshot swivel (115$CAD+TX) with the Wainman's equivalent (40$CAD+TX) and it all went pretty smoothly, but being a curious bugger - I have decided to investigate the guts of the ceased one. All it took - was some poking around with a 1/2" drill bit, so here we go:

I also replaced my swivel with the Wainman, but it was because I had broken my swivel due to an extreme fuckup (kite came free from anchor, flew away on it's own, snagged on a piling by the swivel which saved my kite but took the brunt of the force). Anyway...

I decided to try the Wainman swivel after reading this thread. It was less expensive and came with some great promise. I didn't find it to be any different, in use, than the SS swivel. Didn't work any better or worse. And with regards your friend's seizing up, if you don't rinse any of those things with fresh water once in a while, that's going to happen. I've had a bar since that SS swivel first came out and it is not rusted and has worked just as well since the day I bought it...which as you know is marginal.

Performance seems to vary part to part for me and is also different based on kite size. Maybe it works better on larger kites because the center lines are spread further and direct more force to unspin it ? I dunno. I have seen a lot of claims in this thread that gave me hope, but after additional research and purchases it seems they are all about the same. I have now found that my favorite bars have the swivel above the bar in addition to a manual swivel below the bar. So when you collect spins up top on an ocean downwinder, it's an easy reach to undo them.